There are two things I want to mention, and I’ve been waiting a bit to mention why. I’ll get to why I’ve been waiting in a bit, but first I’m going to talk about moving. Specifically, moving other people. Well, one specific other person, but I think it’s applies directly to other people moving, or at least other people that I move.
Recently my father asked me to help him move an old friend of the family. A rather elderly woman who was moving to an assisted living facility near one of her children. Two of her sons, one daughter in law, and a few grandsons around the age of 20. (It’s not very important, but I do want to mention that the grandsons all looked like body builders. They were huge.) These would have made for a decent moving crew for someone that’d lived in the same house for 40 years, that wasn’t moving everything anyway. And my dad had somehow managed to recruit a number of other folks to help for a couple of hours. Apparently the family members had shown up the day before to help pack, though I couldn’t see any evidence of packing into boxes. So the issues:
1. First of all, we weren’t just moving everything. Some stuff was being left to be thrown away, some stuff was going to given to a neighbor to put in a garage sell, some stuff was being put in the moving truck for the old lady, and some stuff was being in put in the moving truck to be transported to one of the kid’s house. And what was being picked for what was being decided seemingly at random by the daughter in law. Fine. Great. Whatever. Look, if you have ten people standing around with no idea what to move out, and you’re the only person that knows, make it your priority to tell people what needs to be moved. Heck, use colored stickers as indicators, or something, anything. I’m not getting up early on a Saturday so I can spend the whole thing standing around because you can’t get your act together.
2. I don’t know what you call “packing”, but in my experience if you spend a day doing it then you should have a giant stack of boxes that need to be “moved”. I don’t expect to show up and start carefully putting stuff carefully in boxes. It’s not what I do, and I’m pretty sure everyone else showing up is pissed if they have to do it. If you want your precious items packed in such a way that they are not magically turned into a box of tiny shards holding up little metal bits by the time it reaches it’s destination, do it yourself.
3. There were probably 100 drawers in the house, each filled with such an eclectic collection of items that each individual drawer should have been labeled miscellaneous. (There was one drawer with probably sixty or so different packs of cards. I was completely unaware up until discovering this drawer that the little old lady had spent a portion of her life as a card shark. This was the only drawer with an actual theme.) Some of the stuff in the drawers they wanted to keep, other stuff not so much. I understand that you may not want to move stuff and then throw some of it away at the other end, but if you have a lot of people that need to leave soon, you don’t have time to sort through a million knick-knacks first. Just move the dressers and deal with the crap later.
4. If there is some old, cheap kitchen implement in an unopened package that you don’t want, and your mother in law obviously hasn’t needed, and couldn’t use in her new location, then give it to the guy that says he could use it. I want my cheese grater, damn it. I mean, someone could probably have used that kitchen implement. After several hours of volunteer labor, giving someone something nobody wants anyway is sort of a nice gesture. Think of it as a tip. Or insurance against improper packing. That wasn’t a threat, just a suggestion.
I could go on, but I believe I’ve gone on a bit longer than I intended as it is. I’ve considered putting together a guide for people that are asking others to help them move, and this recent experience has strengthened my resolve. People need to know when what they’re doing is just plain dumb, and letting them know how to prepare to move will help me, help the world, help people from doing dumb stuff, at least in moving.
I’ll have to talk about weights in a little bit.